


Greenish-Black

by ZiGraves



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Bad Things Happen To Carlos, Blindness, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-10
Updated: 2013-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-26 05:22:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZiGraves/pseuds/ZiGraves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A lab accident and the sound of the radio.</p><p>Tagged as M/M, but almost more Gen. Erring on the safe side with labels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Greenish-Black

He evacuates the lab first, ensures he’s the last one out. He always does.

Night Vale is his research project, and the research assistants are his responsibility. Even the interns are his responsibility, and this is why the laboratory has the most popular and sought-after internship scheme in the town.

He stumbles, at last, out of the choking haze and into the street. The others are still there, some wearing particle filter masks that he doesn’t remember in the last supply purchase but which he is grateful they have, all the same.

“I think -” he stops, coughs, tries to blink his swimming eyes to clarity and fails. “I think we should let it cool down in there before we go back. Take the afternoon. In the morning it’ll have either stopped or burned down, and we can’t do anything about it either way.”

It’s not what he had said the first time something spontaneously combusted. But that was before the time the fire had become sentient and eaten the extinguisher, and he’d since learned to let experiments calm down on their own.

“And if anyone develops any… symptoms, please take notes and notify me!” he calls after them, hoarse and unheard as his support team disperses for an afternoon off work. His hired staff will, the interns won’t, or won’t notice.

The smoke isn’t quite clearing from his lungs and the blurring isn’t leaving his eyes, so he makes his way home mostly by instinct, fumbles into the shower on autopilot to rinse as much lingering soot off his body and out of his mouth and eyes as he can, and crawls into bed to sleep off the hypoxic headache.

\----

He wakes to a greenish darkness some time later, and this is not unusual. Pawing for the light switch he finds the lamp unresponsive, but this, again, is not unusual. Most likely the Town Council have decreed that it is to be night time, and the lamp is just taking the decree with appropriate solemnity. He sighs, rolls over, and returns to sleep. Thirsty as he is, he knows better than to drink from a glass he can’t see and only vague remembers putting water in.

\----

When he wakes again, it is still greenishly dark. There’s a suggestion of light, and more when he finds the lamp’s switch, but nothing nearly enough to lighten the terrible, opaque fog that seems to start at his very eyes and block even sight of his own hand.

It’s worrying, but not overly so. He dresses by feel, as he learned to do from days when the Council mandated full use of the complete human and inhuman sensorium before they repealed the law on taking one’s health for granted.

His hearing is still good, and his senses of touch and smell, so he uses those to locate doors, shoes and other important things. He’s briefly lost in his kitchen, which has been reorganised again, before the Faceless Old Woman trips him into sitting down in a chair at the kitchen table and nudges a spoon under his questing hand, a bowl of cereal with something that’s almost certainly milk from a mammal beside his other hand.

“Thank you,” he says, but she seems to be gone already.

He finishes his cereal, still staring into that greenish darkness, and very quietly begins to shudder in fear. Senses come and go in Night Vale, but usually there’s a note left by whoever took it, and a promise to bring it back when they’re done with it. There’s been no announcement and no note, and he realises he slept right through the evening radio show last night so he won’t even have heard if there was to be something rolled out across the entire municipal area.

His phone buzzes, but he can’t find it before the noise stops and he’s standing, lost, in the middle of his own living room. Finding a wall and following it with excessive caution, he locates the radio. The sofa eludes him for several circuits of the room. He sits down on the carpet, blind and unable to even call anyone for help, unwilling to risk going outside when he cannot watch out for all the things that try to kill the populace on a daily basis.

The fearful shuddering continues under the mindless noise of the radio, and in a little while there comes the first of many quiet, terrified sobs.

\----

When the evening talk radio comes on he’s still there, though the sobs have devolved into wracking heaves that are utterly, utterly silent. The voice in the radio is the only noise in the house, sinister and sonorous.

“ _The sky is bright, so bright, and you will burn yourself out to look at it. Painfully bright. The sky consumes you, and the world is rendered as dust. Welcome to Night Vale._ ”

A little instrumental plays, and the host’s tone switches to immediate and irreverent cheer as he describes the latest escapades of a flock of adorable and highly carnivorous geological anomalies. He hopes that Carlos the Scientist, beautiful, perfect Carlos, will find them as interesting as anything else in their little town and can perhaps be pressed upon to deliver a short report of some kind.

For the first time since breakfast, there is another noise in the house. He whimpers.

With no sight, no safe means of travel outdoors and no idea where his phone is - or even how to use a glassy-smooth smartphone with no haptic feedback and no vision - he whimpers. Trapped. The bowling alley was bad but this is worse and here he has no one to report his whereabouts or condition to the voice on the radio.

The voice on the radio continues to spill out like warm treacle spiked with powdered glass. Carlos the Scientist gathers his knees to his chest and continues to whimper until he can very nearly manage words.

He knows so few people in this town, even after a year, and he is so alone in that greenish black haze, and it is so very frightening to be trapped in this nonlethal way.

He finds a word at last, and it’s the closest noun he has, the only one that could help at all.

“ _Cecil_.”

The words come more easily once that first pair of syllables has been forced out, a small-voiced babble that’s harshened by his throat, still wrecked from those vicious and silent sobs.

“Cecil, I’m scared. I don’t, I don’t know what to do and this is not scheduled and I don’t have a way to test it and make sense of it and I can’t move, Cecil, help me…”

He recognises it for the petty litany it is, but doesn’t stop. It’s not an invocation or even a proper call that might be heard, somehow, by a passing stranger, it’s just a pouring out of all the fears that been building up and poisoning the heart of him and a begging repetition of that name.

The radio show ends before his litany does, and he’s lost in meaningless words and the noise of the follow-up show: ‘Two Hours of middle Sumerian recited by marmosets in a cement mixer’.

He doesn’t hear the door open, or the single set of panicked footsteps and the little prayer to obscene and forgotten deities before he feels hands on his shoulder. He flinches from them and they lift away for a split second before they are on his face instead, tilting it up in a direction he can’t specify. His litany fumbles, fails against the more ferocious voice that faces him.

“Who did this? Who did this to your perfect, precious eyes? Only you must tell me, because if you do not then how am I to have them hounded out of town and torn apart by scavenging beasts? Carlos, beautiful Carlos, you have to tell me.”

It’s the voice from the radio. There is a coldness in it that’s more terrible than the greenish-black.

“Cecil?”

The voice softens immediately into treacle, without the ground glass this time.

“Yes, yes, it’s me, I’m here.”

He launches in the direction of the voice, arms finding a midriff and face finding a chest clad in a soft sweatervest. It’s so warm and alive that the terror of aloneness subsides and he’s able to just cling as the terror leaves him hiccuping.

“I can’t see,” he says, in a voice that’s nearly lost in the fibres. “And I’m scared.”

“And that’s why you called for me? Oh, Carlos!” The voice is adoring, besotted with the very suggestion that it would be summoned in a time of fear. “Lovely Carlos, I am here, and you do not have to be any more scared than we all are.” Arms enfold him, as warm as the vest and as adoring as the voice. The voice continues, replacing his litany with a burble of unending reassurance and sweetness until slowly the hiccups and the shudders fade into nothing.

He is helped to his feet by warm hands, warm arms around him, leading him, and sat down at the table much more gently than the Faceless Old Woman sat him earlier. Involuntarily he whines when the warm touch retreats to explore his kitchen cabinets, and is silenced when a hand finds its way back to stay in contact with him the whole time.

“It’s not much, I suppose you must keep all your food at the lab for all the hours you work there, you have such a good work ethic it’s just so perfectly inspirational, but I’ve managed to put a few things together and the Faceless Old Woman told me you hadn’t eaten or moved since breakfast when she called me after my show and I’d have been here sooner if only she said something sooner but the show must go on and I suppose she’s right about that.”

It occurs, dimly, that to put anything like a meal together Cecil must have gone well out of arm’s reach at some point. He chooses not to question it, preferring the warm hand in his grasp to stay where it is.

The food’s good if dubious in recipe and the chatter is non-stop, slipping between the radio voice and something more flighty. It only rarely dips into the cold void to try and find out where his sight went and who must be punished, and even that peters out when no answer is forthcoming.

Cecil is offering to train him a pair of seeing-eye ravens when he finally reaches up, feeling for the face attached to the voice. The jawline butts into his hand, feline in manner and canine in the need for affection.

“Cecil. Thank you. Can you stay here tonight?”

The noise Cecil makes is on the very furthest end of human, but just about within audible tolerances. It seems to mean yes.

There is something like sight back in the morning, but it’s as unfamiliar as the greenish-black. Cecil, glowing and benevolent Cecil who can now only be visually described by musical notes outside of the laws of physics, is more than willing to stay a few more nights to help out.


End file.
